He who does not become familiar with nature through love will never know her.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of connecting with nature through love to truly understand it.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel's quote suggests that a deep appreciation and familiarity with nature can only be achieved through love. This connection allows individuals to engage more profoundly with the natural world, fostering a greater understanding of its beauty and complexity.
In practice
During a nature retreat, I shared this quote to inspire participants to cultivate a love for the outdoors.
Prudishness is pretense of innocence without innocence. Women have to remain prudish as long as men are sentimental, dense, and evil enough to demand of them eternal innocence and lack of education. For innocence is the only thing which can ennoble lack of education.
A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
If you want to see mankind fully, look at a family. Within the family minds become organically one, and for this reason the family is total poetry.
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
A priest is he who lives solely in the realm of the invisible, for whom all that is visible has only the truth of an allegory.
Versatility of education can be found in our best poetry, but the depth of mankind should be found in the philosopher.
The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude.
I must go down to the sea again For the call of the running tide It's a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.
Geese appear high over us, / pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, / as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear / in the ancient faith: what we need / is here. And we pray, not / for new earth or heaven, but to be / quiet in heart, and in eye, / clear. What we need is here.
I'll tell you how the sun rose, a ribbon at a time. The steeples swam in amethyst, The news like squirrels ran. The hills untied their bonnets, The bobolinks begun. Then I said softly to myself, "That must have been the sun!
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.
In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.
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